Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read a guest blog from Server Origin’s Kevin Hatfield about ethProxy. ethProxy is perfect for any company that wishes to secure its web presence against DDoS attacks and intrusion-based hacking attempts. Its filtering was built to provide enterprise-grade technology and uptime while still remaining below the cost of the competition.

More Information
Company Website: http://www.serverorigin.com/
Tech Partner Marketplace: http://www.softlayer.com/marketplace/ethproxy

DDoS Protection: Do you need it?

In the last couple of years, you’ve probably seen a references to denial-of-service attacks in the news and how the fallout from those attacks can leave businesses ‘picking up pieces’ for weeks or months after the they occur. Think about the helplessness you’d feel if the business you poured your heart and soul into is shut down by some malicious person or group’s attack on your web presence. Worse yet, those attacks are usually for that person’s or group’s own monetary gain or to satisfy some ego-driven urge to punish you for being successful in either your business or a cause you believe in.

It happens all too often, and most people don’t realize that it can actually happen to them. On a weekly basis, I speak to at least one person that tells me, “We’re small, and we really don’t have any competitors … Our website is down. If we can’t stop this attack, I am going to have to send all of my employees home and close down!”

The truth is that denial-of-service protection providers normally sell “fear.” They do this because people don’t have answers to a few key questions about DDoS protection:

• What are the real statistics?
• What is the probability that my website will be hit with an attack?
• What is the real cost of impact?
• What about my data center? I’m sure they already have protection, right?
• We’ve never been hit before, so why should we consider it a priority?

Many of the causes for hesitation regarding the purchase of denial-of-service protection revolve around the lack of education and valid, statistical data. Most know about Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS), but the details are hard to come by. Most people don’t have experience with attacks, so many assume it’s only the big companies or governments that need to worry.

The untold truth is that DDoS attacks occur on a daily basis, and as many as 2500 attacks occur every 24-hour period throughout the world. In the first 6 months of 2011, ServerOrigin saw 2.3 times the number of attacks we observed and mitigated over the course of the 2010 calendar year.

Let’s say you’re considering protection, and you want to ensure that you remain in control and your business continues operating even if you’re the target of extortion or a collective political or religious movement … and that’s assuming there is a reason behind the attack. Over 86% of attacks occur with no explanation! Considering that statistical tidbit, maybe fear isn’t just a manufactured, marketing gimmick to get you buying.

One of the biggest roadblocks in proactive DDoS mitigation in the past has been cost. The average cost for 12 months of a DDoS mitigation appliance or service to protect 1000Mbps is $78,942.00 – just for the equipment/service. Then you have to factor in the variable cost of the bandwidth USED during an attack.

Server Origin created ethProxy as a service that overlays your current server platform at an affordable price point. SoftLayer provides one of the best dedicated hosting environments, and we’ve built our reputation on DDoS protection, not hosting, so we bring our service to you.

How do I get protected? How time consuming is this process?
Contrary to the belief that DDoS mitigation is some mystical technology that is painful to implement, our ethProxy mitigation service works on the same premise as a Global Load Balancer or reverse-proxy. Setup is as simple as changing your website’s DNS record to a protected IP in our ethProxy filtering cloud, and once that is done, inbound connections are filtered so only clean traffic is sent to your web server. Transition to the ethProxy service is transparent for the end-user and requires no downtime to implement.

The average deployment time is less than 1-hour and the ethProxy protected IP becomes your public interface to the world. Not only does our service pass rigorous PCI certifications, it guarantees your hosted infrastructure is no longer vulnerable to attack, it allows for upgrading your bandwidth/protection in seconds, and it removes the need for additional web application firewalls or accelerators. On average, customers save around 71% by going with ethProxy when they compare us against the cost of traditional filtering methods.

Our ethProxy service is the combination of many different features or services that you may already pay for separately. This allows businesses to transition to our protection service by replacing one of their current providers which would be prove redundant with the ethProxy subscription. Why go through a budgeting process again when you can simply use a different provider that offers you DDoS protection in addition to the service you’re already paying for?

Included in Every ethProxy DDoS Mitigation Package

• Global Load Balancing
• DDoS Protected AnyCast DNS Services
• Multiple US locations / Complete Datacenter Redundancy
• Instant Scalability – Powered by ServerOrigin’s Cloud Network
• Global Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The options and overall value of these services provide protection that no website should be without, while saving you a ton of money … Especially when you consider that running all of these services separately could cost as much as $10,000/mo.

ServerOrigin Communications services more than 1,200,000 million domains worldwide. Our ethProxy service is the single largest globally deployed mitigation service worldwide, and we protect everyone from non-profit organizations to entire governments and some of Wall Street’s largest online providers (No, we’re not allowed to tell you which ones).

Let us show you why our expertise has saved hundreds of businesses and how we can ensure you never have to ‘pick up the pieces.’

- Kevin Hatfield, ServerOrigin Communications